Years

The Blogging Years

~ beetleypete ~ 115 Comments

If I make it to this (my 70th) summer, I will have been blogging for ten years. I know many of you have been bloggers for a lot longer than that, but it only feels like last week since I tentatively pressed ‘Publish’ on my first ever blog post.

A lot has happened since then.

I have made amazing friends, and lost quite a few of them too soon too. I have had stories/articles/blog posts published online, in paper magazines, and even in a published anthology book. Outside of my family, and Ollie of course, blogging has become ‘what I do’, and I have even been recognised in Beetley by strangers, because of the photos I have published of Ollie.

I have published 4,608 posts, including this one, and had 580,000 views of my blog from 188,000 visitors. On one day, I had over 820 views, still the best so far.

My posts have been shared almost 16,000 times on Twitter, 6,800 times on Linkedin, and 6,700 times on Facebook. I am not even on Facebook, so that’s a bonus!

I have been ‘Press This’ 42 times, and I still don’t know what that means. 🙂

16 of my posts have been shared by email, and each post has averaged 45 comments. (As I reply to all comments, you can halve that to 22)

As of today, the lovely Jennie Fitzkee at https://jenniefitzkee.com/ is currently my top commenter. But Jennie is American, and very polite, so always adds ‘You’re welcome’ when I thank her for her comments.

Could there be a better hobby/pastime than blogging? I don’t think so. You can do it anywhere, inside or out, and you will meet some marvellous people from all around the world, if you do it right.

So, to all you ‘New Year’ bloggers. Keep at it. Don’t give up.

It will enrich your life.

Time Slip

~ beetleypete ~ 44 Comments

I have written a lot on this blog about how time seems to pass by much faster as you get older. Over the last eight years, each Wednesday seemed to appear two days earlier than I expected it to, and Christmas felt like it came around every three months.

Some individual days just fly by, even when I don’t have to go to work, and stick to a fairly regular routine. It often feels like I haven’t been up that long, and here I am at 6 pm starting to prepare dinner. I have to stand there and think back on what I have done. Blog posts, taking Ollie out for a couple of hours, maybe a drive into town, and a supermarket shop. I realise that it has actually been quite a long day, and I have been occupied for most of it.

But on the surface, it has felt like two hours, not ten.

Then it dawned on me today that it is still only just May. January seems a distant memory, as if it was two years ago, not five months. It has to be the unusual pressures of the coronavirus measures that have made 2020 seem like one of the slowest years I can remember since my childhood, but I have no real explanation as to why that has happened in my brain.

For the first time in a very long while, time has slowed down for me.

I rather like it like this.

The disappearing year

~ beetleypete ~ 64 Comments

Hard to believe it is already the 6th of April. It won’t be long before some bloggers are counting down the days to Christmas, and I still have unused presents from the last one.

It must be an age thing, but this year seems to be flying past faster than any I have ever known. March felt like it only lasted a week, and before I know it, it will be May. I am haunted by the words of my late Mum, who talked often of how her life seemed to slip away, toward the end. When she remarked that she had hardly noticed a year pass by, in 2010, I thought she was exaggerating at the time.

Now I know exactly what she was talking about.

Maybe it is because I don’t have to work, and rarely leave the cosy confines of Beetley and central Norfolk. My days no longer drag waiting for work to finish, or dreading the shift to come the following day. I have an easier life, and a relatively contented one.

But a much quicker one, undoubtedly. 🙂

7/17

~ beetleypete ~ 53 Comments

Can it really be August already? The seventh month that signals the slide toward Christmas, and brings yet more unstable weather here. It has been a strange year in Beetley. The mildest winter for decades, followed by excessive heat in the early part of summer. Back to normal now, with heavy showers, occasional storms, and threatening skies.

I got nothing done of course. Those tasks I promised myself to do, all fallen by the wayside. I would always do them ‘soon’. After ‘this’, or after ‘that’. And almost unnoticed, they were not done. And likely won’t be now. I still have more than a month to go before our short holiday. Choosing September as always, once the schools go back, and places are less crowded. A quiet seaside village in England, with no need to suffer the stress and fuss of airports, or that seasickness-inducing ferry journey.

2017 was my year to ‘be positive’. Six months gone, and I have managed it so far. Despite many things that I won’t go into here causing enough stress to overturn my determination, I made myself look at the positive side always, even when it seemed impossible to do. Staying positive, for the rest of 2017.

The blog has been huge this year, by my standards. The A-Z challenges were so well received, with views and comments far more than I ever anticipated. Something to definitely be positive about. Despite feeling drained by weeks of the ‘winter virus’, that I renamed ‘the permanent virus’, I didn’t suffer anything drastic. Ollie recovered from his ear infection and tooth extraction, and continues his happy obsessive-compulsive life the same as before.

I get older, more reflective, even more nostalgic. But I have settled into life here, at long last. Though the years pass far too rapidly, they are peaceful years, and a suitable contrast to the sixty hectic years that preceded them. If I can manage to stay positive for the next six months, maybe 2018 will just be positive, without having to think about it any longer.